Tuesday, June 10, 2008

For decades, cult hero Steinski has reigned as an underground legend of the truest sort. Thanks to the nasty killjoy known as copyright law, Steinski's wildly influential old-school sound collages (known as "Lessons") have been furtively passed from DJ to DJ and hip-hop head to hip-hop head without receiving a legal release. Hell must have frozen over, because Steinski has finally gone semi-legit with Illegal Arts' awesomely essential two-disc career retrospective, What Does It All Mean? [Onion AV Club]

"From DJ Shadow to Girl Talk to Cut Chemist and beyond, artists large and small have tipped their sonic hats in his direction." [WIRED]

“Following “The Payoff Mix,” also known as “Lesson 1,” Steinski and Double Dee (as they dubbed themselves) assembled their second piece, “Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix)” – the second in their highly influential trio of hip-hop history lessons. A modern listener will recognize most of the samples in this one, with everyone from Pop Will Eat Itself to Missy Elliott copping them in the years since. “Lesson 3 (History of Hip Hop),” from 1986, rolls up jazz, funk, films and sound effects into a rowdy, insane collection of beats and chopped-up songs.

These three mixes came to be known as “The Lessons,” and have been inspirational to countless bands since then, though the songs themselves have remained somewhat shadowy in great part due to the legal concerns. With literally a hundred samples or more each, getting clearance is probably impossible. These works of genius are living examples of the problems with existing copyright laws, and, since their release, have been more or less impossible to purchase. But that hasn’t stopped them from spreading and inspiring artists like Coldcut, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist.” – Dusted Magazine

NY state of mindWhile promoting his Sirius Satellite Radio Show, 'New York Shuffle,' rocker Lou Reed lost his marbles. During an interview with New York magazine, Reed responded to writer Andrew Goldstein's question about the pending merger of Sirius and rival XM with a verbal can of whoop-ass.

Here's how it went:

Goldstein: "Sirius' impending merger with XM is anticipated to boost earnings. Do you own any stock in the company?"

Reed: "What are you, a f---ing a--hole? I'm here telling you the truth about music and you want to know if I have stock in the f---ing radio? You f---ing piece of s---. What did I do to deserve that?" Link - Spinner.com.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

"First up, New Zealand-based singer Bic Runga performed a handful of acoustic songs with her guitar; comedian Aziz Ansari ("Human Giant") hit the stage. Ansari's irony-laced humor fit well as an opening act for the ironic Conchords. Ansari mixes guerilla humor with more mainstream takes on every day life. One of his more benign takes is on the gluttonous experience of Coldstone Creamery.

Ansari recounted the time he stuck a dollar in the tip jar at the Creamery -- and the workers behind the counter began dancing and singing -- but replacing the lyrics to popular tunes with Coldstone Creamery-related lyrics.

"They were like fifth-rate Weird Al impersonators," he screamed.

The crowd went nuts. Ansari continued to tell his joke, but the crowd wouldn't stop screaming. Ansari finally stopped, mid-sentence.

"What, is Weird Al here?" he joked.

The crowd screamed harder, and the house lights went up. Weird Al stood up and waved. Ansari was dumbfounded.

"I figured, either the joke was that good, or Weird Al was here," he said. "And I knew the joke wasn't that good!" Link.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

[Here's some history on Bo Diddley. If you aint up on him, give it a read, then go buy some of his music.]

In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture.

His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.

It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,” Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs.

Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,” “Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel bubbling tremolo. The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They were both playful and radical.

So were his live performances: trancelike ruckuses instigated by a large man with a strange-looking guitar. It was square and he designed it himself, long before custom guitar shapes became commonplace in rock.

Mr. Diddley was a wild performer: jumping, lurching, balancing on his toes and shaking his knees as he wrestled with his instrument, sometimes playing it above his head. Elvis Presley, it has long been supposed, borrowed from Mr. Diddley’s stage moves; Jimi Hendrix, too.

Still, for all his fame, Mr. Diddley felt that his standing as a father of rock ’n’ roll was never properly acknowledged. It frustrated him that he could never earn royalties from the songs of others who had borrowed his beat.

“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob,” he told The New York Times in 2003.

He was a hero to those who had learned from him, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. A generation later, he became a model of originality to punk or post-punk bands like the Clash and the Fall.

In 1979 Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of the Clash asked that Mr. Diddley open for them on the band’s first American tour. “I can’t look at him without my mouth falling open,” Mr. Strummer, star-struck, said during the tour.

For his part Mr. Diddley had no misgivings about facing a skeptical audience. “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like,” he explained later to the biographer George R. White. “You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!”

Mr. Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city about 15 miles from the Louisiana border. He was reared primarily by Gussie McDaniel, the first cousin of his mother, Esther Wilson. After the death of her husband, Ms. McDaniel, who had three children of her own, took the family to Chicago, where young Otha’s name was changed to Ellas B. McDaniel. Gussie McDaniel became his legal guardian and sent him to school.

He was 6 when the family resettled on Chicago’s South Side. He described his youth as one of school, church, trouble with street toughs and playing the violin for both band and orchestra, under the tutelage of O. W. Frederick, a prominent music teacher at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Gussie McDaniel taught Sunday school. Ellas studied classical violin from 7 to 15 and started on guitar at 12, when a family member gave him an acoustic model.

He then enrolled at Foster Vocational School, where he built a guitar as well as a violin and an upright bass. But he dropped out before graduating. Instead, with guitar in hand, he began performing in a duo with his friend Roosevelt Jackson, who played the washtub bass. The group became a trio when they added another guitarist, Jody Williams, then a quartet when they added a harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold.

The band, first called the Hipsters and then the Langley Avenue Jive Cats, started playing at the Maxwell Street open-air market. They were sometimes joined by another friend, Samuel Daniel, known as Sandman because of the shuffling rhythms he made with his feet on a wooden board sprinkled with sand.

Mr. Diddley could not make a living playing with the Jive Cats in the early days, so he found jobs where he could: at a grocery store, a picture-frame factory, a blacktop company. He worked as an elevator operator and a meat packer. He also started boxing, hoping to turn professional.

In 1954 Mr. Diddley made a demonstration recording with his band, which now included Jerome Green on maracas. Phil and Leonard Chess of Chess Records liked the demo, especially Mr. Diddley’s tremolo on the guitar, a sound that seemed to slosh around like water. They saw it as a promising novelty and encouraged the group to return.

By Billy Boy Arnold’s account, the next day, as the band and the men who were soon to be their producers were setting up for a rehearsal, they were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when Mr. Arnold thought of Bo Diddley. The name described a “bow-legged guy, a comical-looking guy,” Mr. Arnold said, as quoted by Mr. White in his 1995 biography, “Bo Diddley: Living Legend.”

That may be all there is to tell about the name, except for the fact that a certain one-string guitar — native to the Mississippi Delta, often homemade, in which a length of wire is stretched between two nails in a board — is called a diddley bow. By his account, however, Mr. Diddley had never played one.

In any case, Otha Ellas McDaniel had a new name and the title of a new song, whose lyrics began, “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring.” “Bo Diddley” became the A side of his first single, in 1955, on the Checker label, a subsidiary of Chess. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart.

Mr. Diddley said he had first heard the “Bo Diddley beat” — three-stroke/rest/two-stroke, or bomp-ba-domp-ba-domp, ba-domp-domp — in a church in Chicago. But variations of it were in the air. The children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty that goes “shave and a haircut, two bits.”

The beat is also related to the Afro-Cuban clave, which had been popularized at the time by the New Orleans mambo carnival song “Jock-A-Mo,” recorded by Sugar Boy Crawford in 1953.

Whatever the source, Mr. Diddley felt the beat’s power. In early songs like “Bo Diddley” and “Pretty Thing,” he arranged the rhythm for tom-toms, guitar, maracas and voice, with no cymbals and no bass. (Also arranged in his signature rhythm was the eerie “Mona,” a song of praise he wrote for a 45-year-old exotic dancer who worked at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit; this song became the template for Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)

Appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1955, Mr. Diddley was asked to play “Sixteen Tons,” the song popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Without telling Mr. Sullivan, he played “Bo Diddley” instead. Afterward, in an off-camera confrontation, Mr. Sullivan told him that he would never work in television again. Mr. Diddley did not play again on a network show for 10 years.

For decades Mr. Diddley was bitter about his relationship with the Chess family, whom he accused of withholding money owed to him. In her book “Spinning Blues Into Gold,” Nadine Cohodas quoted Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, as saying, “What’s missing from Bo’s version of events is all the gimmes.” Mr. Diddley would borrow so heavily against projected royalties, Mr. Chess said, that not much was left over in the final accounting.

Mr. Diddley’s watery tremolo effect, from 1955 onward, came from one of the first effects boxes to be manufactured for guitars: the DeArmond Model 60 Tremolo Control. But Mr. Diddley contended that he had already built something similar himself, with automobile parts and an alarm-clock spring.

His first trademark guitar was also handmade: he took the neck and the circuitry off a Gretsch guitar and connected it to a square body he had built. In 1958 he asked Gretsch to make him a better one to the same specifications. Gretsch made it as a limited-edition guitar called “Big B.”

On songs like “Who Do You Love,” his guitar style — bright chicken-scratch rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time — was an extension of his early violin playing, he said.

“My technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action,” he told Mr. White, explaining that his fingers were too big to move around easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, Mr. Diddley said, he tuned the guitar to an open E and moved a single finger up and down to create chords.

As his fame rose, his personal life grew complicated. His first marriage, at 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His second marriage, in 1949, to Ethel Smith, unraveled in the late 1950s. He then moved from Chicago to Washington, settling in the Mount Pleasant district, where he built a studio in his home.

Separated from his wife, he was performing in Birmingham, Ala., when, backstage, he met a young door-to-door magazine saleswoman named Kay Reynolds, a fan, who was 15 and white. They moved in together in short order and were soon married, in spite of Southern taboos against intermarriage.

During the late 1950s Mr. Diddley’s band featured a female guitarist, Peggy Jones (stage-named Lady Bo), at a time when there were scarcely any women in rock. She was replaced by Norma-Jean Wofford, whom Mr. Diddley called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said, to be in a better position to protect her on the road.

The early 1960s were low times. Chess, searching for a hit, had Mr. Diddley make albums to capitalize on the twist dance craze, as Chubby Checker had done, and on the surf music of the Beach Boys. But soon a foreign market for his earlier music began to grow, thanks in large part to the Rolling Stones, a newly popular band that was regularly playing several of his songs in its concerts. It paved the way for Mr. Diddley’s successful tour of Britain in the fall of 1963, performing with the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, the opening act.

But Mr. Diddley was not willing to move to Europe, and in America the picture worsened: the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and the Byrds quickly made him sound quaint. When work all but dried up, Mr. Diddley moved to New Mexico in the early 1970s and became a deputy sheriff in the town of Los Lunas. With his sound updated to resemble hard rock and soul, he continued to make albums for Chess until his contract expired in 1974.

His recording career never picked up after that, despite flirtations with synthesizers, religious rock and hip-hop. But he continued apace as a performer and public figure, popping up in places both obvious, like rock ’n’ roll nostalgia revues, and not so obvious: a Nike advertisement, the film “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy, the 1979 tour with the Clash, and inaugural balls for two presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

His last recording was the 1996 album “A Man Amongst Men” (Code Blue/Atlantic), which was nominated for a Grammy. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and in 1998 was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame as a musician of lasting historical importance.

Since the early 1980s Mr. Diddley had lived in Archer, Fla., near Gainesville, where he owned 76 acres and a recording studio. His passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac hearse.

The last of Mr. Diddley’s marriages was to Sylvia Paiz, in 1992; his spokeswoman, Ms. Clary, said they were no longer married. His survivors include his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi D. McDaniel and Terri Lynn McDaniel; a brother, the Rev. Kenneth Haynes; and 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

Mr. Diddley attributed his longevity to abstinence from drugs and drinking, but in recent years he had suffered from diabetes. After a concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 13, 2007, he had a stroke and was taken to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha. On Aug. 28 he suffered a heart attack in Gainesville and was hospitalized.

Mr. Diddley always believed that he and Chuck Berry had started rock ’n’ roll, and the fact that he couldn’t financially reap all that he had sowed made him a deeply suspicious man.

“I tell musicians, ‘Don’t trust nobody but your mama,’ ” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. “And even then, look at her real good.”

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

RIP Bo Diddley"He was a hard-scrabble visionary from the streets of Chicago's South Side who literally had to fight for everything he got. He created rock 'n' roll's essential rhythm, pioneered an approach to electric guitar playing that was at least a decade ahead of its time, and developed a vocal style and stage persona that influenced everyone from Elvis to Chuck D." Link."The legendary singer and performer, known for his homemade square guitar, dark glasses and black hat, was an inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, had a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, and received a lifetime achievement award in 1999 at the Grammy Awards. In recent years he also played for the elder President Bush and President Clinton.

Diddley appreciated the honors he received, "but it didn't put no figures in my checkbook."

Friday, May 30, 2008

Frankiphonic!Stop Smiling is one of my favourite magazines in the world. Following is from their blog. Go listen.

"What’s a frankiphone you ask? A good question, especially if you’re not familiar with Phil Cohran, as he invented it.

Essentially an electric thumb piano, Kelan Phil Cohran developed the instrumenet and used it to anchor the recordings on the album this song was pulled from, Singles. The album is a collection of songs that originally came out on Cohran’s own Zulu Records imprint.

The instrument becomes a focal point on a couple of these songs, which get rounded out Chicago jazz legends like Master Henry Gibson and Pete Cosley. If Cohran’s work with Sun Ra was a little too out for you, this collection tones down the “out” just a tad and wraps everything up in a tighter package.

If you like jazz and/or soul music even a little bit and don’t have this record, I guarantee that it will be a welcome addition to your collection."

You can Buy Cohran's music on recently-reissued CDs from Conch Records. You can buy back issues of Stop Smiling direct from their website. I've bought a few from them, and their service was very good. It also turns up in Magazzino and Real Groovy.

Do fries go with that shake?To finish off NZ Music Month with a bang, Kiwi FM is holding a Live-to-air from Burgerfuel Ponsonby Rd this afternoon (Friday), hosted by Wammo, with a live performance from White Birds and Lemons, and Peter Mac (that's me) DJing his fave Kiwi tunes. Starts 3pm, live band at 4.30pm, and I'm DJing from 5 til 6pm.

Do fries go with that shake? The answer would be yes. That's what I'm getting paid in. Sweet.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

People make the world go roundWas just listening to Benji B's latest radio show and he dropped the above tune, a version by Angela Bofill. Did a quick search and hit pay-dirt - someone's blog with seventeen (count em) different versions of said song, including the Stylistics, Innerzone orchestra, Ramsey Lewis.... Link to Souled On. Nice one.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Moron Says What?I had the pleasure of attending BFM's Fancy New Band Showcase at the King's Arms last night, and damn it was good. Got to see some bands I'd never heard or heard of, and it was great stuff. 20 minute sets, lotsa energy.. especially enjoyed Mean Streets, a taut three piece banging away, and I finally got to see the wonderfully-named Moron Says What? who were every bit as good as their gloriously cool name would suggest. Four young women grooving away, kinda CSS/ESG 80s NYC dance vibe. They finished with a song called Sleep, which they said matched their song Eat (cos everyone likes to sleep and eat, right?).You can check out both the bands I mentioned on the free CD with this months excellent Real Groove magazine. Cheers to BFM for putting it on, and cheers to Real Groove for profiling em. (Moron Says What? on Myspace, Mean Streets on Myspace)

The second installment of the Fancy New Band Showcase is on tonight at the King's Arms. And it's free. So there. Get along. Line-up follows...

Also there's a new FREE Nokia 5610 Xpress Music Phone to be given away on the Friday night – you must be there to pick it up. If you can't make the show, make sure you listen out for the LIVE broadcast on 95bFM with Aroha Harawira from 7-9pm.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

New doco about Arthur Russell (Dinosaur L/Loose Joints)Reviewed at The Playlist, excerpt...Chances are pretty good that, some possible BBC4 venture aside, "Wild Combination" will be the only Arthur Russell documentary to be made in my lifetime. And while I am thankful that a good one exists, I can’t help but feel that a few of this story’s chapters, the very ones that make Arthur an underappreciated giant of late 20th century music, were given short shrift by filmmaker Matt Wolf.

To be sure, it’s not like Wolf gets anything wrong ... but there’s also the very real sense that Wolf is learning the story - and the music guiding it - as he’s making the film; and this makes for a missed opportunity in the narrative of a cellist-composer born and raised in Iowa, who came of age on a Buddhist commune in San Francisco, relocated to mid-‘70s New York where he played conduit between the downtown minimalist music scene, the early art-punk scene, and the gay disco scene, became a great (semi-) reclusive obsessive composer/songwriter, and died of AIDS in 1992.

Generally speaking, "Wild Combination"s deepest flaw is how little play the disco side of Arthur’s legacy gets ... Some minor insight into the film-maker’s disco/not disco decision was given by Wolf at the Q&A that followed last Thursday’s 9pm screening, when he spoke of not wanting those passages to be portrayed in the shadow of the hedonistic Studio 54 cliché. His explanation made it seem like he himself entered the film-making process under the spell of such cultural biases. That’s too bad – ‘cause those biases show through, and continue to under-estimate the power and repercussions of New York’s great disco story."

Read the full review here. Trailer for the film here. Official movie site here, which lists the film as screening here in the NZ Film Festival circuit in July.

There's a great article in Wax Poetics issue 23 on Arthur Russell (scans by the article's author Stuart Aitken, here), and author Tim Lawrence (Love Saves The Day) is currently writing a biography of Arthur. The image above is from Audika Records, a company dedicated to reissuing Arthurs' recordings. It's takne by Arthur's father, with Arthur playing cello, sitting by the lake near his family home.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Corporate Beanbag ExtravaganceChris Bourke has some tales of the old days at EMI here..."For a long while EMI was based in my home town, perched among some very unsalubrious light-industrial buildings in Petone. And of course there were EMI record stores in most New Zealand towns in the 1970s and 80s. I thought I’d share some images from EMI’s heyday, the 1970s. I remember reading somewhere that the success of the Beatles was so massive that their sales alone brought this massive international corporation a profit all the way until 1975. Plus, of course, there were the enormous sales of Fred Dagg’s Greatest Hits."The photos are great! (Hat tip to Simon)

Friday, May 16, 2008

EMI NZ boss goneThe NZ Herald's John Drinnan reports that EMI NZ boss Chris Caddick has been let go, and their staff has been cut from 18 to 9. (link) Excerpted below, read the full article at the link. Simon Grigg also wrote a very good post on the changes at EMI NZ, read it here.

MUSIC GURU'S DEPARTURE HITS BUM NOTE

Global music giant EMI Music has dampened New Zealand Music Month by pulling the plug on a top talent spotter and champion of local music, Chris Caddick.

The departure marks the downgrading of the Auckland business from a fully serviced EMI outpost of 18 people last year to a sales operation of around nine, music industry sources say...

... Caddick and EMI had set sights on becoming the major multinational in the New Zealand market. New Zealand musicians signed or licensed to EMI include Salmonella Dub, Hollie Smith, Golden Horse and Opshop. The moves are part of the crisis at EMI under new management and the ongoing unravelling of the global music industry due to illegal downloads.

The business model is shot. So loss of the managing director of signing acts in this tiny and isolated market will be hardly noticed inside EMI. The company refused to comment, as did Caddick.

Media hype up New Zealand music success overseas but, like other industries, New Zealand is becoming a branch office of Sydney. It is expected EMI will become a sales office and signing talent will be controlled from Australia. Sony BMG still has a New Zealand office but it too is focused on Sydney. Universal Music is the most active multinational in this market but some believe it will eventually revert to a marketing role....

... The issue creates big challenges for New Zealand On Air, which is obliged by law to promote New Zealand culture and identity and pumps money into companies to make records - including generous subsidies paid to multinationals like EMI.

Increasingly the state-owned funder is looking like the artist and repertoire man cajoling distant record executives with cash incentives.

While parts of the music scene live off grants, industry folk believe it is time to stop dressing up subsidies as a culture associated with Music-Month festivities and start treating them for what they are - a commercial industry subsidy."

Back to the 80s setPatea Maori Club - Ngoi NgoiESG - MoodyGrace Jones - My Jamaican guyIan Dury - Reasons to be cheerful Pt3Nile Rogers - Land of the good groove (shout out to Murray Cammick)Troublefunk -Pump me up